Who's Defending Rockefeller Drug Laws? The Prosecutors

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: February 6, 2001

ALBANY, Feb. 5—
As the push to ease New York State's mandatory drug-sentencing laws has drawn the once-improbable support of leading Republican lawmakers lately, one influential interest group has refused to join the chorus: prosecutors across the state, who regard the so-called Rockefeller drug laws as their most powerful weapon against drug dealers.

Last week, the prosecutors, a politically potent cadre, spoke up and intensified its lobbying against softening the mandatory sentences. The New York State District Attorneys Association, representing all 62 county prosecutors, wrote a letter to Gov. George E. Pataki, who has pledged to ease the laws, as well as to Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver and the Senate majority leader, Joseph L. Bruno.

The District Attorneys Association has put in calls to lawmakers and has selected a panel of prosecutors from Rochester to Queens to meet with the governor. It has scheduled a briefing with members of the Republican-controlled Senate, perhaps the prosecutors' strongest allies here. And it has been invited to meet with Mr. Silver, a Democrat, who in the coming weeks is expected to release his own proposal to soften drug laws.

Under current laws, judges have little discretion over whether a drug offender will be imprisoned, and if so, for how long. Instead, they must operate within a range of minimum and maximum sentences that take into account only the amount of the drug seized and the defendant's felony record -- not whether the crime involved violence.

Two weeks ago, Governor Pataki announced his intention to change this. His plan would allow for shorter mandatory terms for drug offenders serving some of the longest sentences, treatment instead of incarceration in some cases and some sentencing discretion for judges.

The judicial restrictions now effectively give prosecutors far greater control of cases, allowing them to use the threat of long sentences to squeeze plea bargains from some prisoners and to force others into drug treatment.

''My concern is that we not go too far in giving away our discretion,'' the Bronx district attorney, Robert T. Johnson, said in an interview. ''This is the first year where I've sensed something is going to happen.''

Political activism is unusual for the state's prosecutors, who are only occasionally outspoken on legislation. None of the state's other law enforcement groups with a stake in the issue -- police chiefs, sheriffs, the state correction officers union -- have been as outspoken.

The most radical part of the governor's proposal -- reducing the mandatory terms for those serving the longest -- is not entirely objectionable to prosecutors, since it addresses a symbolically important but relatively small clutch of drug offenders. A bill has yet to be introduced, but once it is, both sides say privately, the real fight will be over the fate of the lower-level drug offenders and whether judges, instead of prosecutors, will decide who goes to treatment and who goes to jail, and how long the sentences will be.

''We can't live with a system that takes out of prosecutors' hands the right to send predatory drug dealers to prison,'' said the Schenectady district attorney, Robert M. Carney, who is president of the statewide association.

Over the years, mandatory sentencing laws have been credited for locking up some of the biggest drug dealers for long periods of time, and blamed for imprisoning, also for long periods of time, drug addicts who turned to crime only to fuel their habits.

It is widely acknowledged that the drug laws, enacted in 1973, crammed court dockets and state prisons. (New York's prison population has begun to drop only recently.)

Among the 70,000 inmates in the state, 21,000 are there on drug charges, and of those, about 4,200 are first-time felons. And although national studies have shown that drug users are mostly white, 95 percent of the drug offenders in state prisons are black or Hispanic.

Advocates for easing the drug laws, from Catholic bishops to prisoners' rights groups to politicians representing the black and Latino communities that bear the brunt of drug crimes and drug laws, point repeatedly to issues of cost, effectiveness and fairness. The Rockefeller drug laws, their argument goes, imprison scores of low-level drug offenders who need treatment, not jail.

A report promoting the benefits of treatment was released last week by the Correctional Association of New York, the main group beating the drum to overturn the drug laws.

Citing outside research, the report found that treatment as an alternative to prison and treatment programs inside prison were less costly and better at reducing repeat offenses than incarceration alone.

As those hoping to change the stringent sentencing laws have gained political will from the decline in violent crime, the other side, too, has used the decline to assert its case. ''Violent crime is down dramatically in New York State and, in our view, one of the main reasons for the decline is the vigorous enforcement of our drug laws,'' says the letter from Mr. Carney, sent to the lawmakers last Wednesday. ''It would be extremely short-sighted to respond to these outstanding reductions in violent crime by taking away the very tools we have used so effectively to make our communities safer.''